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A Novel
by Michael Gruber
Book Reviewed by:A genuinely exhilarating thriller that simultaneously offers a profound, deeply provocative exploration of the nature of faith itself.
The startling reviews of Tropic of Night announced Michael Gruber as
one of the most talented thriller writers to debut in many years. Now, with the
much-anticipated publication of Valley of Bones, Gruber fulfills that
genre-bending promise as perhaps no writer since Graham Greene, with a genuinely
exhilarating thriller that simultaneously offers a profound, deeply provocative
exploration of the nature of faith itself.
The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon Hotel to
investigate a routine disturbance call -- and, to his shock and horror, watches
as a wealthy oilman plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence.
Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for
solving -- or at least providing a plausible solution to -- the so-called Voodoo
Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.
Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover, in the dead man's
room, a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou
Dideroff. She emerges from a rapturous, prayerlike state and admits that she had
a motive for killing the oilman. Ultimately, she says she wants to confess, and
asks for a pen and several notebooks in which to convey the details of her
confession.
What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects; he enlists psychologist
Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's
explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes
committed, of regular communion with saints -- and with the devil. Is she
mentally disturbed or playacting in hopes of getting declared unfit for trial?
Or does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it
that so many people -- including Paz's biological father -- are suddenly
interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from
becoming public?
As Valley of Bones moves toward its startling and dramatic finale,
Emmylou's "confessions" lead Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales
down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that puts them in the path of
perhaps the most terrifying evil imaginable and forces each of them to confront
questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.
Chapter One
The cop happened to look up at just the right instant or he
would have missed it, not the actual impalement, but the fall itself. It took
him a disorienting second to realize what he was seeing, the swelling black mass
against the white stone and glass of the hotel facade, and then it was finished,
with a sound that he knew he would carry to his grave.
After that, he took a minute or so to sit on the bumper of his
car with his head down low, so as not to pollute the crime scene with his own
vomit, and then reported the event on his radio. He called it in as a 31, which
was the Miami PD code for a homicide, although it could have been an accident or
a jumper. But it felt like a homicide, for reasons the cop could not
then explain. While he waited for the sirens, he looked up at the row of
balconies that made up the face of the Trianon Hotel. The thought briefly
crossed his mind that he ought to go and check the guy out to make sure that he
was actually dead...
This is Michael Gruber's second book writing under his own name (see sidebar). The first, Tropic of Night (2004), a literary thriller set in Miami starring Cuban-American police officer Jimmy Paz, was one of the most talked of 2004 debuts. In Tropic of Night Jimmy Paz investigated a series of ritualistic murders. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memories have been erased -- as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa. In Valley of Bones, Gruber continues to explore the supernatural. Arab oil trader Jabir Akran al-Muwalid, has been thrown off the balcony of his hotel room. Inside his room, Paz finds Emmylou Dideroff kneeling on the floor, having a one-sided conversation with St. Catherine of Siena. Emmylou is put into a mental hospital where she writes her confession. It tells a horrifying tale of her life - insane mother and a molesting stepfather, as well as her time spent as a prostitute, drug dealer, a battle-field medic for the 'Nursing Sisters of the Blood of Christ', and a tribal leader in Africa.
As Kirkus Reviews (giving it a starred review) says, 'no second-novel slump here. Gruber has drawn even with John Sandford and
has power to spare.'
Personally, I find Gruber's adult books to be rather disturbing reads - that's not to say they aren't good but simply that the supernatural elements take me to the limit of my
comfort zone. However, I endorse wholeheartedly his children's book, The Witches Boy! As the Washington Post says, 'Valley of Bones is equally fascinating and even more troubling because its
subject is the power of Christian faith, as embodied in a woman who may be a
saint or may simply be delusional. Either way, the tormented, painfully candid
Emmylou Dideroff is one of the great characters in recent popular fiction.'
Full Review
(330 words)
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Although Tropic of Night was his first book in his own name, Gruber has ghost-written 14 books for his cousin Robert Tanenbaum (his mother and Tanenbaum's mother are sisters). According to Publishers Weekly, in 1984 Tanenbaum, a successful trial lawyer, called him from his offices in Los Angeles asking him to look at the first hundred pages of a book he had written at the request of a publishing house. Gruber says "I called him, and I said, 'This is unsalvageable. It's not a novel, it has no characters, no plot, nothing.'"
In return for half the advance, Gruber rewrote the novel, they renegotiated the contract and went into...
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